“Unity is not a user-friendly software,” I was told by a friend who had taken the VR storytelling class before. “It crashes a lot,” he added. Even after hearing these words, I did not lose the excitement to try my hands on a gaming software. A public relations professional who also knows how to use a gaming software! That’s a crucial skill to add on my resume. This was one of the reasons I enrolled in this class. Finally, I am here writing a blog post about my first encounter with the software. I must say that the rumors about the software were true but not completely.

I created a virtual beach on unity for this assignment. For the beach, I added a sandy terrain on which I created mountains with a rocky texture with palm trees facing the sea. I imported a vehicle, a house, an airplane and two boats to make the environment look more real. Though the process of creating a virtual beach was fun, it was highly time consuming because of the limitations and buggy nature of the software. I had difficulty adding a water texture because the water seemed to appear pink instead of blue. The system froze a lot when I was importing assets and trying to place them in the scene. I also added sound to some of the assets and applied the 3D sound-effect on the same with a liner sound diminishing function. As per what we were taught in the class, this function is supposed to diminish the sound as move farther away from the object, which is the source of that sound. I made sure I took all the steps to ensure this effect was in place. However, when built the scene and tested it, the sound-effect had not manifested. What was even more bizarre was that this problem sorted itself after a few attempts of rendering and testing the scene.

However, there were many aspects of the software that I liked a lot. Firstly, Unity did not crash even once during my stint with it. Secondly, creating and terrain and importing assets to it easy and fun. Once one understands how to move objects around using the three dimensional scale, one can experiment and complete a full scene very quickly. One question that still haunts me about unity is how do I create a real looking water body that has a depth to it. A water body such as an ocean or a river. The virtual sea that i created was shallow and wasn’t tailored to my satisfaction. Since, this was my first experience with Unity, I am sure that learning to do the same will not be very hard.

When using the software, I found myself thinking of ideas that could be implemented using this software. For example, creating scenarios to solve problems can be a useful tool to train people in certain professions. Using Unity, one can create a treasure hunt game that utilizes characters and terrestrial hints to solve mysteries and find things. One can also create detective games that involves conversing with avatars to get ideas and collect information that helps the protagonist find the missing pieces of puzzle.

One can also create fun games that involve nature and can act as a virtual tour for places that one plans to visit in the future. By creating a virtual walk around one can first experience a holiday in the game and then do those activities in reality when they actually visit the place. This will help tourists get a fair idea of the place they will be visiting and understand the potential opportunities or setbacks associated with the location.

Overall, Unity is a powerful software and its potential can be felt when one uses it. Apart from some of the bugs it possesses and its overly complex functions, it is a very good software to learn and experiment with.